This was caused, he said, by a centralised system of commissioning by people who increasingly have no real experience of the production process they oversee, and who comprise an "uncreative crust".

He painted a picture of a system rooted in the "pseudoscience" of broadcasting, analysing and applying lessons from digital information about audience behaviour – down to the point, to a split second, at which test groups switch off, or lose attention.

Archer argued that this promises the impossible – the illusion that there is a way to guarantee everything made is a hit. Instead, he said it was a recipe for dull and copycat programming.

His reading of recent television history is that the rise of independent production in the 1980s, however desirable as a means of injecting diversity and competition, also handed more power to a growing band of commissioners and channel controllers, as broadcasters became increasingly publisher/broadcasters; heads of in-house production departments (such as Archer) lost out.

After 2000, he claimed, controllers took total control of final decision-making on programme commissions. They then constructed a theoretical basis for central decision-making around increasingly sophisticated research, to the point of obsession. Allied to this was the rapid rise of schedulers, "who understand audiences so well they can bring success to even the most clueless channel controllers. Like the trusted advisers in a royal court, their power can be enormous." He claimed:

"It is a regular sight to see a channel controller in a meeting with may be a dozen advisers, and not a single one of them has ever actually made a programme."

Archer sounded bitter, yet his conclusion, that commissioning rather than programme-making is now the way to the top in television, is accurate (with a few honourable exceptions). It is also equally true that there are far too many independent producers chasing commissions, but that a successful pitch can from time to time turn into the stepping stone to serious money. Either way, commissioners are indulged as demi-gods, even if both sides privately decry each other.

It is also true that there are complaints about a rising level of interference, micro-management and demands for costly re-editing, which most recently were ventilated in guarded form against Channel 4's centralised commissioning team overseen by Jay Hunt. But there was, in public, silence. Archer explained it this way: it is "suicidal to make a fuss about behaviour".

There is certainly a gulf between those who produce programmes and the salaried commissioning class, allied with number crunchers, above them. The BBC's Respect at Work report, published in May, found evidence of such pressures.

But what is missing in Archer's description is the economic pressure also bearing down on programme-makers, which works against experimentation.

Archer's suggestion is to tear down the present system, devolve decision-making, reinstate programme strand editors with the power to edit, and restore a degree freedom for producers to decide how to shape their programmes. It deserves, at least, a rattling good debate.